


The Space of Unreality

by DarylDixonGrimes



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, flowery smut, i had to write something because i'm shipping this hard, i slipped a ma'am in there because pls frank, kastle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 19:36:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6533635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarylDixonGrimes/pseuds/DarylDixonGrimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Dreams are the only place he allows himself her... Dreams are harmless. He can't hurt her there. He can't pile more danger onto her already dangerous life. He can't suck her into the seedy underbelly that is the space he lives in now. The only person he can hurt inside of his own head is himself."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space of Unreality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damnmysterytome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnmysterytome/gifts).



Frank doesn't sleep much. In fact, he honestly can't remember the last time he got a full night. It was sometime long before the Punisher took over the flesh and bones of the man who died at the carousel, that much he did know. He didn't used to mind it—only getting an hour or two here or there. A steady diet of black coffee and even blacker vengeance had kept on his feet, and not sleeping had afforded him a lot more time to hunt down and kill every living cell that made up the putrid infection plaguing humanity.  
  
But a tiny slice of that humanity is exactly why he does mind now. A slice of humanity with shiny blond hair that always smells faintly of spring, with a will to unravel the truth no matter how many times people tried to sew into her the threads of doubt.  
  
Dreams are the only place he allows himself her. Frank's not an idiot. He knows there's no future for them. Hell, there's not even a future for just him alone. There can never be a house in the suburbs and a white picket fence and the laughter of children, not for him again, not for her ever. And even if that's not the life she wants, he would still hazard a guess that she wants to be with someone who isn't a wanted man with bounties on his head from both sides of the law.  
  
Dreams though, dreams are harmless. He can't hurt her there. He can't pile more danger onto her already dangerous life. He can't suck her into the seedy underbelly that is the space he lives in now. The only person he can hurt inside of his own head is himself. But he's been doing that for a long time now, much longer than he's known her--another reason sleep used to be an unwelcome visitor.  
  
Some part of him knows it should stay that way, that he's only torturing himself by letting his dead heart live and breathe and want again. But the other part, the part that longs to see her smile and laugh and exist night after night, snuffs that other part out like it's just another criminal to be disposed of. So Frank switches to decaf after nightfall and keeps a bottle of melatonin on the shelves next to the rounds for his AK-47.  
  
They're small changes, but between them and the cold iron of his own will, she visits more often. More importantly, she stays longer.  
  
The first night, they meet at a diner. Frank's subconscious doesn't let him recognize that it's the diner he frequented back before he deployed, one his conscious mind knows was converted into a dry cleaner's years ago. But even if it did, he wouldn't care. All that matters is the way she reaches for him over the laminate tabletop, grasping his hand like it's the only important thing left in the world. She speaks passionately, her free hand animated with the details of whatever investigation her heart has led her on this time. She's the most alive this way, and when he wakes in the early hours of the morning, he can't remember her words, if there were even words at all, but he remembers the fiery tenacity in her blue eyes.    
  
The second night, she's barely there. He's back overseas in the desert, trekking through a cave and looking for something he can't quite come up with a name for while she flits around the shadows like a ghost, always out of reach. In the morning, he decides it's still enough to have had her there at all.   
  
The dreams go back and forth. Some nights, like the diner dream, they heavily feature her. He gets to talk to her. He gets to watch her smile at him like she knows there's a part of him that's still human buried within the ashes of Frank Castle's old life. Other nights, she's just there, a figure on the periphery or a face in the crowd. 

It takes nearly three months and seeing her again in the real world for the inevitable to happen in the other.  
  
He more than expects to see her in his head that night, especially after finding her among a group of kidnap victims (again).  
  
He'd killed the men responsible and let their captives go, all of whom hurried away. Except her. Instead of running, she'd forced him to escort her to the closest diner, where he'd watched her butter a piece of toast with something more like annoyance than real fear.  
  
She'd been halfway through a packet of strawberry jam when she slammed her butter knife down on her plate.  
  
“You're an asshole, you know that?”  
  
Frank hadn't answered. Instead, he'd held his cup up to the waiter for more coffee, glad that the old man didn't question the cuts across his knuckles or the flecks of drying rust on the back of his hand.  
  
“I haven't heard from you in three months, Frank. Three.”  
  
“That long, huh?”  
  
“Yes, Frank, that long. That long wondering if you were even still alive.” She'd gone back to spreading jam, the edge of the knife scraping audibly across the bread.  
  
“I seem to remember you telling me I was dead to you.”  
  
“Oh that is a bullshit excuse, Frank, and you know it.”  
  
It had taken a solid ten minutes for her to finish reaming him, biting into him with the same ferocity that she bit into her breakfast. Instead of trading jabs, he'd mostly sipped his coffee, studying the way she moved, the way she sipped her water, the way she wiped a stray crumb off her mouth with the back of her hand instead of bothering to reach for the napkin. He'd known exactly when she was done berating him in the sigh that rose and fell quickly beneath her wrinkled silk blouse.  
  
“Promise me you won't do that to me again, Frank.”  
  
And he'd known by the look her eyes that he couldn't refuse such a small request, even if it was a foolish thing for her to care about someone like him.  
  
“Yes, ma'am.”  
  
When he sees her in his head later that night, there's nothing of the dreams that came before before. There's no diner. There's no shadow of her on the edges of another reality. There's only her and the clean white sheets of the bed beneath her.  
  
Where typically his dreams are fleeting, this one seems to stretch out toward the vast infinite. He tastes her first, his lips following the gentle curves of her flesh, pink brushing across milky cream. With his mouth alone, he studies the lines of her body, tracing the outsides of her thighs, the unmistakably feminine shape of her hips and waist, the soft peaks of her breasts. Everything is deemed worthy of his attention, from the knobs of her knees to the silky skin on the insides of her wrists.  
  
When he's done, he tastes her mouth, the gentle sigh she releases into their shared air not lost on him even after years of damaging his hearing with loud gunfire. He loves her. He knows it here as well as in the waking world, but here is the only place he's willing to accept it as a reality.  
  
Her pleasure becomes his sole focus, and he focuses his attention between her thighs, gently rubbing with calloused fingers before kissing down to the space between them, worshiping at her altar with a hymn composed of lips and tongue.  
  
“Frank,” she sighs, the sound making him feel true passion again the way nothing else does anymore. The skewed reality of dreams means he doesn't notice the jump between tasting and feeling, and he doesn't question it when finds himself inside of her, feeling her body clench around him, her fingers clutching at his neck and back.  
  
She makes love as ferociously as she does everything else, writhing gorgeously into his every movement, kissing at the line of his jaw and the sweaty skin below his temple like he might disappear if she doesn't.  
  
“Frank,” she says again, moaning it quietly into his ear this time, and he allows himself just once to say the thing he tries so hard to stay away from, like saying it will give his feelings the true power that he doesn't want them to have.  
  
“Karen,” he says, right into the crook of her neck. Only once. Once, and then they're both toppling over the cliffs between tension and completion, grasping at each other with all they have and all they are. And maybe Frank's always thought the concept of two becoming one was a cliché even before he was broken, but it's exactly what he thinks within the space of unreality when he feels her legs tightly gripping his waist while they ride through the storm together.  
  
When he wakes in the 3 a.m. darkness of the apartment he's squatting in, he's covered with a sheen of sweat and disappointment. Dreams, after all, are the only place he allows himself her.  
  
Only now he's not so sure dreams are enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [ tumblr. ](http://daryldixongrimes.tumblr.com)


End file.
